One Good Dog Read online

  The key is, behave like a Labrador. Let them stick that fake hand into your food dish and not react. Bring the stupid ball back and drop it in their laps. Pretend that fake kid is a real child and all you want to do is lick its face, protect it from harm. Drool a little. Give ’em your best play bow. Oh yeah, I was totally socialized.

  So I got my first person. A nice middle-aged lady looking for a watchdog. Living on the edge of town, a block or so from the rough part, she thought she needed a big tough-looking dog with a heart of gold. She would have been all right, too, if she just hadn’t persisted in being frightened of me herself. Okay, maybe it didn’t help when I greeted every passerby as a threat to the homefront, and nearly took her off her feet when I lunged at passing dogs, but I wasn’t sure of protocol. I’d been raised in a cellar. I’d been trained to fight. That was what had been expected of me, and this change of direction was confusing.

  I left after a week. I just couldn’t take her mincing around, talking to me in that infernally soothing baby talk that did nothing to disguise her fear sweat. Made me want to fulfill her prophesy. She accidentally left the gate open and I took that as a not-so-subtle hint to beat it. I wandered by a few weeks later and saw she’d replaced me with a yapping fluffy. Perfect.

  It wasn’t long after that when I finally met my mentor. He’d been leaving signposts for me, aware of my desire to meet him. A rangy-looking male, mature in years, and uncontested king of the neighborhood, a gladiator like me, the hallmarks of a fighter’s life written in his skin. We came upon each other on the corner, where his territory and my tentative claim conjoined. I knew that he’d been around there from his mark; he knew I had, too. I was surprised to see him with one of those tags dangling from a collar around his thick neck; surprised, too, to find out he was a companion, when his scent described a street dog.

  We greeted; I offered submission with a lick of his chops. No sense making the king annoyed right from the get-go. I didn’t want to look like a challenger, I just wanted a little advice. He was headed east, so I followed. We walked along an overpass, chatting about where I’d been so far. He snuffled along my spine, checked my genitals, and winked. You’ll miss them less that you think. Otherwise, a little incarceration is sometimes a good thing. The next best thing is a street man. They’re not unlike us; we both forage and sleep rough. We are both invisible to the general population, and sometimes we’re both rounded up. The difference between being alone and in company with a man is that the food is easier to come by. He shares and he can open things we can’t.

  Our DNA is full of the original partnership between us and humans, forged for exactly the same reason this old boy had forged his alliance with his companion. Safety, food, a voice in a speechless world.

  You should get one.

  I shook, cocked my leg against a lamppost. I’m not so sure. I think I want to keep solo for a while more.

  Caged? Meaning was I new to freedom.

  Yes. I bowed, stretched, and left my new friend as he caught up with his person coming out of a building. Even from a distance, I could smell the scent of hot food on him. I watched from a safe distance as the man slipped his hand out of his pocket and offered a slice of meat to the king of the street. I may want to rethink this solo thing. The man and my mentor made their way down the street, he with his head bowed, a soft mutter coming from his mouth, and my mentor with his nose just at the man’s heels. A picture of companionship.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The idea of standing over the ultraheated water in the industrial sink as he sprays plate after disgusting plate makes Adam slightly nauseous. The smell of food combined with warm dishwater has permeated his skin and he cannot seem to shower it off.

  The center is busy when Adam arrives for his shift. Already a dozen men are on the stoop, waiting in the cool air for the dining room doors to open. There is an activity room on the first floor, a television set, a small library of paperbacks, even a computer with Internet access available to the guys, with a lock on porn sites, but the room remains empty, as it has the whole time Adam has been here. The men are like nervous bunnies, willing to eat from the hand of charity, but not willing to spend too much time in its lap.

  Adam does not speak to the men. He still doesn’t know most of their names, or recognize their individual faces; he doesn’t look at them, just at their empty plates when he’s assigned to the steam tables. They don’t converse much, even with one another. There’s a quiet about them, as if each one is solitary in his world, the proximity of others in like circumstances not a bond, but a wall.

  Adam hates the fact that Big Bob insists that everyone use the front door, not sneak in the back door via the alley. He’s had to tell Adam twice. Everyone here is a man and comes in through the front door.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m a volunteer, a temporary helper. Why do they need to see me come through the door?”

  “It has to do with dignity. It’s our way of leveling the playing field.”

  Adam feels the ache start up again in his ribs. Whose dignity exactly is Big Bob talking about? Wouldn’t everyone be happier if he could just come in the kitchen door?

  Jupe and his dog wait for the dining room door to open, lined up with the others on the steps, a very few passing the time with quiet conversation, often with only themselves. Adam licks his lips, tilts the ball cap that he’s begun wearing lately, and soldiers past the group, which becomes as silent at his approach as teenagers when the principal walks by. As Adam mounts the steps, Jupe’s dog bows and yawns; his tail wags. Adam feels the flush of embarrassment, as if he’s been caught avoiding someone he knows. He nods to the men.

  “March, you gonna work the tables today. Mike’s down wi’ the flu.” Rafe keeps bopping to the rhythm projected into his ears, speaking a little too loudly. He’s sauteing onions in a massive frying pan. The scent breaks through the miasma of soapy dishwater and wet industrial-strength mops to tickle Adam’s juices. On a stainless-steel cutting table lies an enormous purple-brown slab of liver, waiting for Rafe’s knife to carve it into thin slices. Two caldrons the size of oil drums bubble on the range, potatoes on the boil. Liver and onions and fried potatoes for lunch. Despite his intellectual revulsion, Adam tastes the saliva forming. Rafe tosses the mess of onions up and around, up and around, without losing a single thinly sliced ring.

  Working the tables means being near the men. Adam’s job is to carry a bucket and sponge around, wipe each table off between groups, pick up the detritus left behind, make sure the condiments are full, act, in other words, like a busboy. The men come in as fast as he can make a place ready for them, so he’s often wiping as new men sit down, their plates heaped with the luscious-smelling onions and the tender liver. Liver was a frequent item on the menu during his boyhood, a cheap piece of meat with touted values. Not everyone can cook liver without making it tough and indigestible. The idea of it is abhorrent to Adam. In his adult life, he has never allowed liver on the table. Ariel has never even seen liver and onions. The one housekeeper he and Sterling had early on once suggested it and had her ass handed to her. Liver and onions are the food of poverty. Yet the tantalizing smell of it neutralizes his associations. Rafe, he already knows, isn’t going to let a lousy piece of liver out of his kitchen; not only are his cooking skills top notch but his pride is equal to any top chef Adam has ever met. Looking at a plate of hand-cut fried potatoes tumbling against the thinly sliced liver with its garnish of perfectly sautéed onions, Adam is surprised to find himself looking forward to his own lunch.

  But first he has to walk around the room, where the delicious scent of fried onions is countered with a backwash of dirty clothes, unwashed heads. Instantly, he loses his appetite. Adam keeps refilling the wash bucket with hotter water, more Pine-Sol. Anything to get the smell of the men out of the room before he’s expected to sit in here and eat.

  “Excuse me, sir. Can I bother you for a clean fork? This one has a bit of food stuck between the tines.”

/>   Adam stands behind Jupe, wash bucket in his hand. The phrasing coming out of the old bum’s mouth is at such odds to his appearance, to his “Buddy, can you spare some change?” street patter, that for a moment Adam thinks that Jupe has some ventriloquist’s hand up his back. “Sure.” He takes the offensive fork and dumps it in his wash bucket. Like a good waiter, Adam fetches Jupe a new fork.

  “Thank you.” Jupe goes back to eating, slicing his meat with fork in left hand, knife in right, daintily cutting one piece at a time, keeping his fork, in the British manner, in his left hand as he eats. Every now and then he slips a piece of meat into his jacket pocket, a bum’s sleight of hand.

  Adam washes down the other half of the table. As he does, he can’t help but glance at Jupe, who is surrounded by men wearing their entire wardrobes. The old man wears his watch cap pulled low, the long gray hair spiking out from beneath the tattered edge and lying against the threadbare collar of the army jacket. Like many of them, Jupe is probably old enough to have served in Vietnam. There are one or two who are still fighting the war, as they jump out of their skins whenever Rafe drops something in the kitchen. Big Bob calls them his “Stressies.” As Adam moves to the table behind Jupe, he spots him slipping half of his portion of liver into his pocket. Some of the men are known hoarders, as if the center were going to disappear and they’d be left hungry. But Adam knows that Jupe is sharing his free meal with that dog of his, the one stationed at the bottom of the stairs. Big Bob has told Jupe over and over not to leave the pit bull there; it frightens people, he says. Jupe says the dog does whatever he wants to do. He’s an independent thinker.

  It’s late by the time the last of the men leave the dining room. Adam feels contaminated, like he has spent a lifetime with his hands in hot water, running the sour-smelling sponge over tabletops and seats. His earlier anticipation of lunch has been long since been squelched. All he can smell is Pine-Sol and sweat and the peculiar rubbery smell of his own hands after hours encased in Playtex Living Gloves. He’s folded the tables and tucked them together, run the wide-headed broom around the floor. At the staff table, Rafe and Ishmael are wound up about the baseball play-offs. Big Bob is heading to the table with his plate loaded. “Go get some lunch, Adam.”

  Leaving the push broom at ease against the serving counter, Adam goes into the kitchen, whose smell is redolent of the liver and onions. He stares for a minute at the slices of meat left in the warmer, brown now, almost the same color as Rafe.

  His third foster mother sits him down in front of a plate of her liver and onions and whacks his head every time he puts his fork down. The liver is dry, forming a nasty paste in his mouth; he can’t make it go down. Tears begin to ooze out of his eyes, not from crying exactly, but from the release of frustration. He’s only been in this house for a few weeks. By now he understands that he is always going to be temporary. He shouldn’t get comfortable in any house he is brought to, just try to behave, try to be unobtrusive. But his foster parents are always finding ways to make him do wrong. At night, he can hear this foster mother arguing with the man who isn’t her husband, although the social services people think he is. Sometimes Adam can hear crying; other times, he hears only the slap that silences it. They’d fought last night, and today he is being forced to eat something so vile, he can’t swallow it.

  Shifting the lump of chewed meat in his mouth, Adam whispers, “Veronicaveronicaveronica.” A mantra of protection muttered under his breath. Someday, Veronica will come and punish those who have been cruel to him, unloving. In his narrow bed, or, as here, the den couch that serves as his bedroom, Adam rehearses the heroic return of his half-imagined sister. She didn’t mean to leave him behind. She can’t find him because he’s been moved so many times. Veronica’s myth is embellished during wakeful nights. “Veronicaveronicaveronica.” Talismanic hope.

  The lump of masticated liver slowly works itself down his throat—it’s like swallowing a rock—and suddenly is cast up.

  Foster mother number three slams a fistful of mashed potatoes into his eight-year-old face.

  Adam yanks his catering jacket off and tosses it into the laundry bag. He crumples the paper hat, dropping it into the barrel. He goes out the back door. He’s not coming back. Fuck the judge. Later, Abramowicz points out that a contempt-of-court citation will lead to worse things than mopping up after street people. Once again, a judge is in charge of Adam. He is, as much as the men he serves daily, in the system.

  Adam stares into the empty night street, waiting for the lights at the newsagent’s to come on. Waiting for his life to begin again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The one thing about being on the street in the nice weather is that you feel smart. Too smart to depend on anyone, too smart to need anything but an open Dumpster and a leaky faucet. Then it gets cold. I and my kind began to scrap over good nests, the sort that have shelter from the biting wind and some sort of accommodation, a blanket or a dry newspaper. Too many nights, I found myself in the fetal position, with my back against the nominal protection of a wall, the dry culvert or the underpass not already occupied by someone unwilling to have a roommate. My beneath-the-stairs bolthole of the summer had been reclaimed by its former owner. My sublet was over.

  My mentor showed me some of the better backyards. His man traveled in the early hours through sleeping neighborhoods, rifling through the heavy plastic trash cans with the kind of lids that defied those of us without thumbs. He’d toss my friend delicacies and take for himself objects, which he thrust into the pockets of his coat. I stayed well behind. My mentor positively forbid me contact with his person, who was a one-dog man, and I wasn’t going to screw that up. Instead, he’d point me in the direction of a dryer vent or an air-conditioning unit sequestered behind sheltering bushes, a very comfortable and weather-tight nest.

  Except for the remnants my mentor might leave me, food was getting harder to come by as people spent less time outdoors, and my loss of condition made it feel twice as cold to me. The restaurants offered fewer leftovers, as if the human population was bulking up for the cold weather and wasting less food. My water sources were turned off, and that was the hardest challenge, save for the occasional heated birdbath. The park’s little lake was sometimes the only water available, and that was frequently under a sheet of ice. My cage-bound upbringing had not educated me in the skill set necessary for carrying out ice breaking. I waited until the geese wore a hole in the ice with their foot action and then ventured out. Risky, I know, but thirst is a powerful motivator.

  Cold, hungry, and mostly thirsty, I was still happier out on the street than in that cage in that cellar, waiting for a fight or for my hour on the treadmill, or that blessed ten minutes of backyard relief. Here I defecated and pissed wherever and whenever I wanted to. I’d even begun building up a little territory for myself. Despite my involuntary neutering, I still liked the girls and introduced myself to a number of them. Sweet. No one was in heat yet, so it was just dating.

  All in all, it was okay. That is, until the blizzard.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It has been snowing since before dawn. Wind-whipped flakes so small, they look like needles slashing down in the streetlights. The snow comes sideways, reverses itself, and swirls in the opposite direction. The media have been prophesying this storm for days, and the gleeful look on the weather lady’s face this morning is positively the radiance of a woman who has been proven right. She reminds Adam of Sterling.

  They are now officially divorced; the final decree was handed down three days before Christmas. Sterling had signed where she needed to an hour before he arrived. He’d stared at her showy signature, Sterling Madeleine Carruthers. Unwilling to stay married to him, she had abnegated his place in her life by reverting to her powerful maiden name. He no longer existed for her. Just his money. The power and reputation of her father, Herbert Carruthers, had made it easy for the courts to assign Sterling the majority of their joint assets: the houses, the cars, the portfolio. The court
has also entailed a percentage of his future earnings in alimony and child support. His fledgling consulting business hasn’t taken off—or, to be honest, is nonexistent—and he takes a certain satisfaction in the fact that he has so little income to offer them.

  Sterling and her parents took Ariel to Greece for the holidays, citing her distress as a reason to take her out of reach of Adam for even his court-agreed-upon holiday visitation. Somehow the court didn’t mind, his rights clearly of a lesser importance than hers. Immediately after they returned, Ariel was kept out of his reach by other obligations. Adam wonders if Sterling lies awake at night making up reasons for him not to see his only daughter. Even when he does manage his Saturday-afternoon visits, Ariel is sullen and uncommunicative, as if he is a stranger to her, someone she’s forced to share space with. He excuses her behavior as symptomatic of adolescence, but he’s hurt. Like all divorced fathers, he knows that he is trying too hard, making her visits to his small apartment all about fun and nothing about reality, sushi instead of dining in, video games instead of conversation. Ariel stoically resists having fun with him. She comes to visit but refuses to stay overnight; she doesn’t want to sleep on the futon and won’t swap with him.

  It is like hosting a foreign exchange student who speaks no English. The pantomime of good father, devoted child is lost in translation.

  Adam stares out, hoping that the newsagent will open despite the weather. Hoping, childishly, that Big Bob will call and tell him to stay home—yippee, a snow day. Ever since the first below-freezing day, the center has hosted twice as many homeless as Adam had seen in the warm weather. Men flock in to grab a little food and a lot of warmth. Many won’t stay, but a group of ten or so use the bunks in the dormitory upstairs, mainly guys fairly new to the street, who haven’t toughened up yet. Big Bob welcomes them, hands them bedding and a pillow, and points out the rec and dining rooms. He takes their names, offers to receive mail for them, their monthly Social Security checks, their army pension checks. A place to call home.